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JESUS AND PAINE. 


Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: 

We are met here to-day to honor the life and services of 
Thomas Paine. We could not be in better business, if we 
tried. 

A month ago, over all the earth where the spires of Chris¬ 
tianity pierce the sky, Christians gathered together to celebrate 
the birth of a person whom they cannot prove was ever born. 
Christians could be in better business without half trying. 

We have to assume that Jesus lived. We know that Paine 
lived. 

The name of Jesus belongs to an age when men were 
deified; when the divine was not a3 high as the human is now. 

The name of Jesus has influenced the world far more than 
have his deeds. I hold that his name does not belong to our 
civilization. Civilization does not depend upon gods, but upon 
men. Human brains have discovered every path of progress, 
and human hands have erected every monument of achieve¬ 
ment. Men have done everything for gods; gods have done 
nothing for men. Men have net only supported their gods; 
they have made them. It is far tiuer to say that man made 
the first god from the dust of the ground than to say that God 
made the first man in this way. 

Jesus is a myth, who has been accepted by some as a god 



2 


JESUS AND PAINE. 


and by others as a man. I have read somewhat about divini' 
ties, but I know nothing about them. The biography of Jesus, 
as we have it in the New Testament, shows that it is a wise 
“divine child” that knows its own father. 

If Jesus lived on earth and was not a man, then I cannot 
guess what he was. 

I shall deal with the character of Jesus as painted by the 
gospel-writers, but most of it to me is paint. 

I wish to say right here that I do not believe that such a 
person as the? Jesus of the four gospels ever existed. It is 
against him the way he came into the world. A miracle was 
added to his birth before he went to sleep in his mother’s arms. 
It is singular that ghosts can be fathers and not mothers. 

Then I do not like the accounts of marvelous things which 
he is said to have done. Miracles are always dead and buried. 
No one living ever saw a live one. Like angels, we hear of 
them but we never see them. No hand ever touched the white 
lilies of death and turned them to the red roses of life. 

Neither do I believe that Nature displayed any particular 
emotion wheu Jesus died. The earth does not shake with 
grief, the rocks do not rend themselves with sobs, nor do graves 
open their doors when gods die. When Jupiter fell from his 
heavenly throne Olympus did not so much as heave a sigh. 
When Serapis was beheaded by a Christian batlle-axe the 
mighty pyramids did not topple over, nor the Sphinx cry aloud. 
Nor did the earth give any sign that it knew when the heart of 
Jesus ceased to beat. Thousands of gods have died and not a 
cloud of heaven has shed tears of sorrow upon the ground. 

Let the truth be told! No man ever saw a god die and no 
man saw such phenomena of grief as reported in the New 
Testament when the son of Mary “gave up the ghost”. 

Sacred histories sometimes contain sacred falsehoods, but 
science cannot kneel to superstition. If Jesus lived, and if his 




^'■ iy 1930 


JESUS AND PAINE. 


3 


life went out on the cross, it went out with no more notice from 
the earth than when a bird’s song dies in the air. 

Nothing has polluted the intellectual and moral atmos¬ 
phere more than the pictured cross and its ghastly burden. It 
has served only to illustrate the cruelty of the past. Let us 
rather have emblems of joy in our homes. Happiness here 
makes salvation unnecessary for the hereafter. 

When men die for theii brother-men, as did rugged old 
John Brown, at Harper’s Ferry, they gljrify their deeds, not 
the gallows upon which they expire. And when they meet 
death like Socrates, who tried to destroy the gods that he might 
save men, they add a mw lustre to heroism, not to the poison 
they drink. 

The path to the cross is not clear to my mind. I see no 
logical connection between a pair of innocent idiots eating the 
forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden and the Son of God dy¬ 
ing on a tree in Golgotha four thousand years afterwards. But 
I am not going to undertake to solve that old theological puz¬ 
zle. It is too much like placing “cat’s cradle”. The cross is 
not a mental or a moral guide-post. It stands for nothing and 
points nowhere. 

I have said that Jesus was a god to some, a man to others 
and a m>th to me. It Jesus was a sublime peasant of Galilee, 
a mighty reformer among his people, a large and tender-hearted 
lover of his race, who could grandly give the wealth of his life, 
and, if need be, the red river of his veins to save the world, 
then I blame the writers of the gospels for not sa>ing so. I 
honor every human being who has reached out a hand to a 
fellow-traveler on the road of life, or who has put a lamp in his 
window tor the stumbling feet of men, at d 1 say now, if a man 
lived in Balestiue two thousaud years ago, great enough and 
gooo enough to work and die for humauki d, that man has my 
respect and my reverence. 


4 


JESUS AND PAINE. 


But I have no respect for the mythological creature of the 
gosptls. 1 do not Enow whether a god who goes about on 
man’s legs can walk on the sea as well as on tne laud; whether 
he can add the blush ot wine to the pallid face of water; 
whether he can drive disease away wuh a word or a touch and 
prove ueaih to be a lie; whether lo can cheat eaith of his body 
and be received up into neaven, but 1 do know ihat a man can¬ 
not do such things. 

I believe that man is the biggest thing and the best thing 
that ever Walked ovtr tnis old earth. I believe that every L niug 
that has been told about gods and what gods have done m this 
woild has been told to sed the stock in some pious cor^oraiiou. 

If JesUs was a man, we have got to ruo out almost all of 
Matthew, Mara, Luke and Jonn. it Jesus was a man, (Juris 
tianity is a fraud. 

Wnat was Jesus, in the light of reason, in the light of com¬ 
mon sense, in tne ligni of scieuce and in tne lignt of facts? 

He Was uot the son of Hod. He was not tne son of the 
Holy Hnost. He Was not ttie s^n ol Uavid. He was not the 
Messiah, the (Jurist. He Was not the King of the Jews. He 
was not the savior of mankind. He was not divine. He was 
not tne Master of men. He was uot wnai he has been cracked 
up to be. 

What did J 8us do, in the light of reason, in the light of 
Common sense, in tne lignt of science and in tne light of facts? 

He uid not see “the spirit cf Hod descenuing like a dove 
and ligntiug upon him.” He did not hear “a voice from 
heaven, saying: i'his is my beloved son in Whom 1 am well 
pleased.” He did not tight that disputatious dud iu the wil¬ 
derness with the uevil. He did not heal a leper. He uid not 
drive fever from Beter’s wile’s mother Dy tuuoniug ner haud- 
He did not scare devils out ol men and women. He uid not 
make the blind see nor tne dumo taik. He uid not walk on 



JESUS AND PAINE. 


5 


water, unless it was frozen. He did not feed twelve thousand 
people on nothing and have something left. He did not raise 
Lazarus from the grave after he had been dead four days. He 
did not change water into wine. He did not go up into heaven 
with his flesh and bones on. He did not do one single miracle. 

That is what Jesus did not do. What he did do is hard to 
tell. He did n’t do much. He did n’t, really. 

Take away from the gospel-story all that is mythical and 
miraculous, that is, all that is false, and you could not build a 
Christian church a foot high on what is left. Any institution 
that stands upon myths and miracles is not in harmony with 
the genius of this age and is no help to an honest mind. 
f Even though Jesus wrought the wonders related in the 
gospels, not one of them is worth two cents to the men and 
women of this age. They are merely wax-figure performances. 
You could not get them patented. The miracle of the loaves 
and fishes does not feed the starving millions of to-day. The 
miracle at the marriage in Cana does not put a bottle of wine 
in the hands of the sick and feeble. The miracle of walking 
on the sea does not help our brave sailors when their ship goes 
down. The miracles of healing have not driven a disease from 
earth. The miracle of restoring Lazarus to life has not kept 
death away from our doors. Nor did the miracle of ascending 
bodily into heaven give to others the power to “go and do like¬ 
wise”. 

If Jesus was possessed of divine power why did he not do 
something practical, something useful, something that would 
help the world? Why did be not give to man the telescope, 
the microscope, the sewing-machine, the reaper and binder, the 
printing-press, the telegraph and the telephone, the power 
loom, the cotton-gin, ether or chloroform, something that would 
increase human knowledge, something that would save the 
backs of the toilers, the tired eyes and worn fiDgers of mothers, 


6 


JESUS AND PAINE. 


something that would banish suffering and agony, something 
that would sweeten life and give more music to the dull air? 

He saw men wanting everything and he gave them noth¬ 
ing; saw them poor, lowly and unfortunate and he never told 
them how to better their condition; saw them naked and told 
them that God would clothe them; saw them huugry and told 
them that God would feed them; saw them cold and said that 
God would make it hot for them; heard them crying for bread 
and he pronounced beatitudes upon them. 

Jesus out of all his miraculous wealth did not give to the 
world a brass pin, a cut nail, a lucifer match, an agate button, 
a glass bottle, a lead pencil, a fish hook, a jackknife, or a pair 
of spectacles. Take those few things out of human life to-day 
and back to the “chaos and old night” of barbarism would man 
go in one minute, and yet Jesus did not seem to know the im¬ 
portance of one of those things. 

Jesus had twelve apostles, twelve men whom he selected 
to carry out his mission to mankind. When he sent them forth 
into the world what do you suppose he told them to do? To 
show the people how to make window-glass, how to do sanitary 
plumbing, how to saw logs into shingles and clapboards, how 
to make a cook-stove, how to distil illuminating gas, how to 
make a leather shoe, how to construct a clock, how to make a 
plow, how to build a ship, how to manufacture paper, or how 
to make soap? Not a bit of it. Jesus told his apostles to go, 
“preach that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, heal the sick, 
cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils.” That was 
his charge. The apostles were to be preachers, doctors and — 
impostors. The kingdom of heaven which was “at hand” two 
thousand years ago has not shown up yet; the dead have never 
been brought back to life; leprosy is si ill an incurable disease; 
and devils have never been found by the surgeon’s skill in hu¬ 
man bodies. 


JESUS AND PAINE. 7 

The only sane thing that Jesus charged his apostles to do 
was to heal the sick, but not one of them immortalized his 
name as a physician by his remarkable cures. 

We live in a magnificent age; in an age of wondrous in¬ 
ventions, of glorious achievements; in an age when science 
stands triumphant upon prostrate superstition; in an age of 
emancipated mind, of intellectual light and moral warmth; in 
an age when humanity’s heart is touched by humanity’s wants; 
in an age when the welfare of man is the highest concern of 
human government. 

What did Jesus contribute toward the glories of this age? 
Had men obeyed his voice they would still be standing with 
folded hands and prating lips. The fertile brain of man and 
not any father in heaven sowed all the seeds of progress and 
civilization* 

Jesus never said a word that would put a star on our flag; 
never said a word out of which could come the Declaration of 
Independence; never uttered a sentence from which could 
grow the public school, tne public library, or the public plat¬ 
form. Jesus did not work for his fellow-man, but for his 
Father in heaven. He told men to seek the kingdom of God, 
not the republic of mau. That kind of talk never would have 
pushed this world ahead half an inch politically, socially or 
morally. Jesus and his Father in heaven together did not do 
what Thomas Paine did for human freedom, for human en¬ 
lightenment, for human happiness. 

A great many people think that we have no right to speak 
of Jesus as if he were a man; no right to criticize his words or 
deeds as reported in the Bible. They say that it is irreverent 
to do so. I want to say that I have no reverence for myths, for 
impossible beings, for falsehoods or frauds; no reverence for 
priests and their impositions, but I have reverence for right, 


8 


JESUS AND PAINE. 


for justice, for truth, for anything and everything that consults 
man’s interest and man’s well-being. 

It may shock the miseducated ears of some Christians to 
hear the names of Jesus and Paine coupled together, but I 
think that I can show that Jesus has been in worse company. 
People who worship Jesus think they do no wrong in slander¬ 
ing Thomas Paine. It is irreverent to my mind to lie about a 
great and good man; far more than to tell the truth or to give 
an honest piece of one’s mind about a Holy Ghost. 

Too many people reverence what is called ‘‘holy” without 
inquiring whether it is good for anything. Now, my test of 
goodness is usefulness, and I apply it to tniugs religious as well 
as to things secular. Does it help man in this life? That is 
the question. If a thing does not help man here then it is no 
good. I do not want to buy stock in gold mines in auother 
world and pay for them in the gold of this world. The holy 
things of the Church are of no practical value. You could not 
sell them on a bargain counter. No^ a thing that Je&us divi is 
put iuto practice by man to-day — except praying, and that is 
putting a pump into a dry will. Real things are holier than 
‘“holy” things. A good home is worth a dozen heavens. 
What is beneficial to man is more sacred than what priests and 
ministers have mumbled a lot of pious nonsense over. If only 
those thiugs are holy which have been consecrated by a priest, 
I prefer to take mine profane. 

I honor all the sensible teachings of Jesus, and would not 
rob him of one leaf of the laurel of fame which honestly crowns 
his dead brow, but I must let my lips speak the truth, and say, 
that, grand as are some of the moral precepts in the ‘‘Sermon 
on the Mount” it would have been impossible for Abraham 
Lincoln to have found his Emmcipation Proclamation in its 
words. The slave had to wait nineteen hundred years alter 
Jesus died before there was enough love of man in the breast 


JESUS AND PAINE. 


9 


of a nation on this earth to strike the shackles from his limbs; 
and, more than this, the followers of Je&us called those who 
advocated the abolition of slavery—infidels. 

The pathway to liberty from the first morning of the first 
year of the first Christian century has been blocked by mm 
who upheld tyranny in the name of God. Aye, and through 
all those long centuries was the struggle for human liberty re¬ 
sisted by those ordaiued to do the divine will, and the sword of 
the Church which was drawn to defend God was plunged into 
the hearts of the nobleot lovers of men. But, in the language 
of B)ron: 

“They never fail who die 
In a great cause; the block may soak their gore; 

Their heads may sodden in the sun; their limbs 
Be strung to city gates and castle walls— 

But still their spirit walks abroad. Tio’ years 
Elapse, and others share as dark a doom, 

They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts 
Winch ovei power all others, and conduct 
The world at la^t to freedom.” 

The gosp- l-wiitcrs put some glorious sentences into the 
mouth of Jetus, but, when all is said and done, the supreme 
test is this: Do the> make human life happier and living easier? 
Take all the beatitudes of Jesus, take bis great strmon and add 
in ihe ‘ Golden Buie”, and, a.l together they do not measure 
up for the working man or woman against three square meals 
a day, a good suit of clothes and a ton of coal. 1 would not 
give much for a fruit tree that never bore anything but 
blossoms. 

No angel whispered a lie into the ear of the mother of 
Thomas Paiue. he came into the world with two human par¬ 
ents. No miiauulous light shone over his cradle, and no heav- 
enl> choir saug songs of piaise when he was born. No wise 
men came from Chiua or India to Thetford looking for his ad¬ 
vent ana no star of htaven stood sentinel over his birthplace. 


lO JESUS AND PAINE. 

Paine was just an ordinary baby, who grew into an ordi¬ 
nary child and developed into an extraordinary man. What 
makes one person a genius and another person a fool no one 
can say. Heredity accounts for something, environment for 
something, but nothing that we know accounts for the rest. 

Paine’s life up to the time he came to America is not im¬ 
portant to us to-day. What prepared him for the great part he 
was to play in the revolutionary drama which was enacted on 
this continent a century and a quarter ago it is impossible to 
know. If ever liberty walked the earth in flesh and blood, 
surely it was in the form of Thomas Paine. He came to our 
shores like destiny. 

The American colonies, while resisting oppression, de¬ 
clared loyalty to their king. Then fallowed the Nineteenth of 
April and quickly afterwards the Seventeenth of June. From 
that hour rebellion was a fact and a new nation a prophecy. 

One of the first to see that separation from Great Britain 
was inevitable was Thomas Paine, although he had been but a 
few months in the country. With the eye of genius he saw 
the colonies free and independent States, and in the fall of 
1775, with the “shot heard round the world” ringing in his 
ears, he sat down to write the pamphlet from whose inspira¬ 
tion came a new nation, uublessed by priests and cursed by 
kings. Paine boldly declared that all men are created equal; 
that no person is the ruler of another and that every one has 
the same right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiuess. 
He had witnessed the evils of monarchy, the tyrannies of no¬ 
bility, and he asserted with Tennyson: “ ’Tis only noble to be 
good.” 

Paine saw the wrongs in the world and he bravely assailed 
them—although he had to do it alone. He denounced African 
slavery in America when the Christian pulpit defended it as a 
divine institution. He demanded justice for woman when the 


JESUS AND PAINE. 


11 


whole of Christendom robbed her of every jewel of her nature. 
He a«ked men to show kindness to animals when Christians 
were uukind to their feDow-men. He could not be indifferent 
to human wrongs wherever they existed, and they existed 
wherever there was a priest or a king. 

Jesus said: “Think not that I am come to send peace on 
earth. I came not to send peace, but a f-word.” 

Paine said: “I would gladly agree with all the world to lay 
aside the use of arms and settle matters by negotiations.” One 
of our foremost senators recently said: “The most hopeful 
moral force in the world to-day is arbitration. Every moral 
and educational force in the country should be directed to a 
universal acceptance of arbitration.” Thomas PaiDe wan the 
first to advocate international arbitration to settle disputes, and 
not Jesus; in fact, Jesus never considered a national question, 
never had an idea of political liberty, never comprehended the 
meaning or the glory of human independence. 

Jesus said: “I am come to set a man at variance against 
his father and the daughter against her mother.” 

Paine said: “If this earth is ever to be covered with hu¬ 
man happiness it will be by parents treating their children 
with affection and children treating their parents with respect.” 

Upon whose words could a happy world beet be built, upon 
those of Jesus, or upon those of Paine? 

Paine came to abolish the evils, the wrongs, the supersti¬ 
tions which Jesu3 upheld and helped to perpetuate. Jesus 
said: “bender unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and 
unto God the things which are God’s.” For eighteen hundred 
years the world was divided by Caesar and God, that is, by the 
king and the priest. Then came Thomas Paine and in thunder 
tones cried: Render unto man the things which are man.s’ 

Those words announced the downfall of the crown and the 
crozier, of the imposition of divine government for mankind. 


12 


JESUS AND PAINE. 


Between the throne and the altar man had been crushed, 
robbed and betrayed. The king owned the body and the priest 
owned the soul, and what one did not steal from his victim the 
other did. Millions of slaves toiled to support one despot, and 
accepted their slavery upon the word of the priest as a condi¬ 
tion imposed by divine love. But, with the words of Paine 
retribution began and justice became a hope in the hearts of 
men. 

The three mightiest contributions to political and religious 
freedom which mankind bad known came from the brain of 
Thomas Paine. What he wrote changed the whole civilized 
world. He helped to establish a republic in America, to se¬ 
cure man his rights in England and to revolutionize i ranee. 

He accomplished the Herculean task of making men think, 
and upon that most important of all subjects—themselves. 

Paine saw that superstition sucked the blood of sense from 
the brain as the thirsty mouths of the air drink the water from 
the soil and that there could be no true liberty where there was 
priestcraft. 

Jesus said to his disciples: “Preach the gospel to every 
creature:” “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, 
but he that believeth not shall be damned.” Paiue said to the 
wo^ld: “To do good is my religion,” and he practiced what he 
preached. Jesus prayed to his “Father in heaven” and got no 
answers to his prayers. Paine worked for man and saw the 
glories of religious and political freedom as the result of his 
labors. 

Thomas Paine spoke the greatest words of the eighteenth 
century. He did more for human liberty than any man who 
had lived before him. If he did not start the ball of revolu¬ 
tion rolling: in America, he kept it rolling after it was started. 

In writing anything he asked himself only two questions: 
Is it right? Is it.true? That was enough for Paine. He did 


JESUS AND PAINE. 


13 


not ask the Christian question: Will it pay? Thcrras PaiDe 
stood upon light and truth, and he believed that the world 
should stand upon them too, and he did all he could to make it 
do so. 

What he did, he did for the people. He was man’s friend 
and he knew man’s enemies. He never sold his voice or pen. 
What he said, he said straight from his heart, Ho man ever 
wrote more earnesily and no man was ever read more eagerly. 

The highest monument of injustice on this earth is Amer¬ 
ica’s ingrati ude to Thomas Paine. This monument has been 
built by Christian malice out of Christian falsehoods. I shall 
be satisfied if I can take one 8t Q ne from this monument. 









9 



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